Everyone else folds and grabs their winnings.
A cut crystal decanter sits on the table calling my name. The liquor inside catches the white light from overhead and turns it into an amber fire. Six heavy-bottomed glasses ring it in a neat arc.
Drake catches my eye from his place beside my empty chair, reading my mind. I grunt my acknowledgement when he points at the liquor. The edge of his lip curls with a knowing smile.
He reaches for the decanter with a lazy confidence I've never seen in another man. He has the kind of calm that never readsas softness, but speaks volumes about deep-rooted control born out of living a violent childhood. Back when we first started out, he swore the abuse he suffered would not ruin his adult life. So far, he's kept that promise to himself.
Across from him, Luca Valentina is doing what Luca does best at every meeting… absolutely nothing productive. He has a pen spinning between his fingers with the absent-minded precision that makes you forget the man uses those same fingers to ruin lives and empires. He used to be a runner which is a coded way of saying assassin-for-hire for our competitors, Club Genesis, and then he got smart, joined my side and with that came the riches.
Now he runs intelligence, blackmail, and surveillance networks that stretch to three continents. Luca knows your fucking secrets before a priest does after Sunday Mass. He is also, infuriatingly, the most naturally charming man I have ever met, which means he gets away with things that would get anyone else thrown from this floor.
Massimo Santoro is our legal counsel and damage control architect. He's reading something on his phone and wearing the expression he always wears in these meetings, which is the expression of a man silently calculating how much everything happening around him will cost to fix. Either in money or blood, in most cases. Massimo turns sins into paperwork and paperwork into survival. He has saved every man in this room at least twice, and the fucker has never once let any of us forget it.
Konstantin Vetrov, who prefers Kon, sits with one leg crossed over the other and a glass balanced on his knee.
He is Bratva, which means he was born to a particular school of problem resolution that makes our methods look like a stronglyworded letter. He controls enforcement, security, the work that none of us want to discuss by name in a boardroom with glass walls. He is also, to the constant irritation of everyone present, funny. Not trying-to-be-funny. But actually fucking funny. He has a dark, bone-dry humor that makes you laugh and think you're going to hell for it. And he's the size of a brick wall in an expensive suit which has the tendency to draw the wrong kind of attention. Let's just say going out for drinks with him always ends with mashed bottles, busted up bar tables and bruised knuckles.
And then there is Rowan Volkov. I feel the burn of eyes drilling into me. I look up to find him watching me from across the table with those observant, ice-colored eyes that miss nothing. Rowan controls the ports, the shipping lanes, the Eastern European channels that run goods across oceans. He speaks rarely, moves constantly, and is always exactly two steps ahead of wherever any conversation is trying to go. He already knows what I am thinking tonight, and that's why he's watching me.
These are the men of the Red Letter Syndicate.
And I am their king.
I take my drink back to the window because I need the distance right now. I also need to feel the burn of the scotch against the back of my throat while I remind myself that I built everything that is spread out below me. Every light below me, every judge, every regulator, every contract that keeps the empire breathing is mine. I built it from the rubble of what my father tried to break and what my brother's death tried to finish. I built it with eighteen-hour days and decisions that kept me awake until the gray edge of dawn, with sacrifices that left permanent marks on everything soft I once had inside me.
And in four months, I could lose all of it.
The thought sits like a stone where my heart should be. My father's ultimatum is not new, but it has grown teeth in the last few weeks. Four months to produce an heir.
Not a plan for an heir, I need to point out.
No, Enzo Milano wants me to breed a woman and give him a physical heir for the Milano empire before he dies. Or at least have one well on the way. Something has the man spooked and thinking the reaper has his name on speed dial.
The reason behind his demand doesn't matter when the end result is the same if I don't comply.
No heir means Milano Senior will invoke the original succession clause buried in Redthorne Holdings' founding documents and take the company back by legal right. He had his lawyers draft the language three years ago when Marco died by self-inflicted wounds. I don’t want to talk about that ugly night, so I’ll leave it there.
But I know my father reworked the founding documents because I had Luca's people pull the original files the day after the funeral. We spent hours poring over every contract my father had my brother sign. Since he's dead, it passed to me automatically.
I could take it or leave it. I took it because I thought I had time. Trust me, three years goes by quickly.
My father is a man who grieves by building better cages to control every asset under the Redthorne umbrella and that includes me, family be damned. It doesn't matter that he and my brother nearly ruined everything while my brother was incontrol. Nor does it matter what I fought to rebuild for the family.
I take a long swallow of the scotch and feel it burn a clean path down to my stomach. I let myself stand here for a moment in the particular silence of a man who has everything except the thing everyone wants him to want. An heir. A son. A woman willing to step into the role.
The problem is not that I do not want those things. The problem is that I have spent the better part of the last decade becoming the kind of man no woman with good sense would choose freely.
I know what I am. I have not visited the Scarlet Thorn in over a year, not for pleasure anyway, and even when I was there it was always business wearing the costume of indulgence. The club sits seven floors above our heads right now, its hallways full of the kind of wealth and desire that used to interest me, and these days it feels like a painting I have seen too many times. The novelty burned off a long time ago. What is left is pure indifference.
Running Redthorne Holdings, managing the legitimate face of the Milano family's reach, overseeing the financial structures that keep six different criminal operations from ever appearing criminal on paper, is a consuming occupation. It does not leave room for romantic courtships that forge the kind of partnership I am after.
Fuck, that sounds cold, but love is just another kind of business. Either way you think about it, my lifestyle does not leave room for the patience that building trust requires. Every woman I have met at the level where a Milano king meets women has either been after the empire or afraid of it. Neither option produces thekind of partner I need to respect at a breakfast table for the rest of my life.
My father does not understand this. My father's generation produced heirs the way he produced everything else, and that is by deciding what he wanted and taking it. For him, consequences never entered the picture. He has never once considered that the problem is not my reluctance but the situation he created—debts, empty coffers, owed favors, just to name a few issues. After Marco passed, my father handed me a broken throne that eats men whole and told me to find a wife in the margins of that consumption.
The door opens behind me with a soft knock, and Redthorne's executive assistant, Damaris, steps in with the evening's delivery. She is a compact, efficient woman in her forties who has worked for this building for fifteen years and has never once asked what is in the red envelopes. I respect that about her enormously. She sets the bundle on the far end of the conference table, secured with a wax seal the color of arterial blood, and withdraws without a word.
Massimo reaches for the bundle first. Luca, however, gets there before him with the particular efficiency of a man who exists to be annoying, and he drops the bundle in the center of the table with a theatrical thud.
